This site is a random collection of personal stuff.

Are you looking for the smarter M. Zaffalon?

Random Notes

Amplitude and Phase Modulation

Or how to tame the Bessel functions. A mostly pictorial representation of the sidebands of amplitude and phase modulated signals. This is adapted from a blog post written when I was an application scientist at Zurich Instruments.

University Classes

227-0689-00L System Identification HS2023

A class on system identification given by Prof. Smith at ETH on standard and regularized least-squares, frequency- and time-domain methods, ARX-ARMAX systems, subspace and closed loop identification. The lecturer did not provide notes so a colleague and I wrote them: the notes have not been reviewed and surely contain errors. We also make the solutions of the coding exercises available since they were not provided.

227-0216-00L Computational Control FS2023

A class on advanced control systems given by Dr. Bolognani at ETH that includes model predictive control, system identification, Markov decision processes and reinforcement learning. Since this class was given for the first time and the course notes were still missing, I wrote them: notes have been only partially reviewed and surely contain errors.

227-0103-00L Control Systems HS2022

An introductory class to control systems (my first) given by Prof. Dörfler at ETH. The course material focuses only on linear systems: stability, PID and their tuning, controller design via "loop shaping", LQ Regulator, optimal state estimation.

I appreciated how Dörfler stayed after class to answer students' questions.

I also had the pleasure to work with a talented young engineer.

Control Systems Lab: Helicopter on a Stick

While taking Dörfler's class, a colleague and I did a lab where we controlled an helicopter on a stick: this lowers the number of degrees of freedom from 6 to two. Here is the report. We had a few interesting revelations in the process.